Sussex Family Historian Vol 9 No 2 June 1990

By Stanley Excell, 61 Loxwood Avenue, Broadwater, Worthing, West Sussex BN14 7RF.

The year was 1793, and unprecedented alarm was sweeping the known world.

Armageddon seemed near. There were wars and rumours of wars. The armies of Europe were marching and counter-marching, as they had done many times before and were to do more than once again. Only, this time the whole situation seemed beyond understanding. News came slowly and unreliably and was often confusing and sometimes contradictory. Not everyone could read, and for those who could the reports in the newspapers of the time were brief, formal and not easy to comprehend. As news spread through the land it became distorted by gossip and error and speculation. Few ordinary people possessed maps or an atlas, and many had only a vague idea where these strange-sounding European kingdoms and principalities were situated. Silesia and Sardinia might have been, for all they knew, somewhere near the sea-coast of Bohemia, famed in Shakespeare.

It was a confusing time, and people began to wonder how long civilisation could hold together, and whether it would all end in anarchy and chaos.

France after the Revolution was at war with Austria and Prussia, and had seized the Austrian Netherlands, Nice and Savoy. Louis XVI had been arrested and tried amid wild scenes of public disorder. 1793 began with his execution on 21st January, and on 1st February France declared war on Great Britain and Holland, both of whom joined Austria and Prussia, with Spain, Sardinia, Tuscany and Naples in a coalition, which on 26th March was supported by the so-called Holy Roman Empire. France was now ringed by the spears of potential invaders, but was in an alliance dating back to 1778 with the emergent United States of America. The new power, however, saw no reason to become embroiled in senseless conflict, and chose St George's Day on which to declare neutrality. Prussia and Russia took the opportunity of partitioning Poland between them, and we seized French possessions in India.

In a bankrupt France, chaos ensued. During a period of savagery, untold numbers were brutally put to death, and Civil War broke out in Brittany and elsewhere. Of those endangered, all who could do so escaped abroad, many arriving in desperate straits in southern England.

There was unrest here, too. Invasion of the south coast was feared, trade was interrupted by the conflict, and shortage of food fuelled price rises and a demand for higher wages.

No wonder there were those who thought that it would not be long before the hoof-beats of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would be heard in the land, as the end of the world approached.

In peaceful Broadwater, a Sussex parish with its southern boundary running along the Channel shore, the widowed Elizabeth Penfold died on the twenty-fifth of August 1793. Although she had not reached the psalmist's three score years and ten, she had lived through difficult and alarming times. Her memories ran back to the war with Spain, the War of the Austrian Succession, invasions of England by the exiled Stuarts, the Seven Years War with fighting in India and North America, and the Independence of the United States. All her life she had lived through wars, privation and unrest, and the headstone erected over her grave in Broadwater churchyard bore witness to the unsettled and disturbed times she had known.

Carved in Portland stone, it depicted the day of judgement, cut in low relief sunk below the prepared surface of the stone. A simple carving made by a village craftsman, it suited its surroundings perfectly. In the centre, borne on a cloud with remarkable sense of approaching movement, we see the Second Coming, while two cherubic angels are sounding the final blasts on their loud trumpets. On the right we see the tower of Broadwater church split in twain, and a diagrammatic map of the churchyard where the dead are beginning to rise from their tombs. On the left, the turbulent sea is beginning to give up its dead as they emerge from its depths, and square-rigged ships shatter in the storm.

It is a remarkable stone, now heavily eroded by time and weather, but it survives in the churchyard among other Penfold graves near the door into the north wall of the chancel, and the inscription is still just legible, although only in favourable lights, it reads:

In Memory

of Elizabeth, widow of

Mr Peter Penfold,

who departed this life

the 25th of August 1793

aged 64 years.

Edward Sayers, listing memorials in Broadwater churchyard, on page 131 of his published work "Transcripts of and Extracts from Records of the Past" confirms the inscription.

So does H E Snewin in his manuscript "Broadwater Church Inscriptions" in Worthing Public Library, except that the date of death is recorded as the 26th. We learn, too, that there was a footstone reading "E P 1793", confirming the yeardate, although today that stone cannot be found. The same transcriber's associated manuscript copy of the "Broadwater Parish registers; 1558 onwards" tells us that the burial was on 31st August.

From the same source we learn that the marriage between "Peter Penfold, bachelor of this parish" and "Eliz Grevatt, widow of this parish" had been in 1763, thirty years earlier, and that the Reverend Thomas Lewes, Vicar of Tarring, had conducted the ceremony. Baptisms of their children are identifiable as Peter on 19th May 1764, Susanna on 6th April 1766, George on 21st August 1768, and John on 27th October 1776. Of these, Peter was buried on 1st November 1776, and Susanna on 3rd October 1778. Peter Penfold the father was himself buried on 27th March 1789, and Sayer's published transcript of the inscriptions tells us that he died on 24th March aged 48 years, while in certain lights the headstone is just legible enough to-day to confirm this.

We do not find Elizabeth's previous marriage to John Grevatt in Snewin's careful transcript of the Broadwater Parish Registers, so we may assume that this took place elsewhere. A sad story of infant mortality is shown. Their son John was buried on 17th January 1758, followed by the baptism of William on 9th April and his burial on 11th June in the same year. Their daughter Mary was baptised on 2nd May 1759 and another son John on 30th November 1760, followed by his burial on 21st January the following year. 1762 brought the baptism of a daughter Ann on 13th February and her burial on 22nd May. The sad chronicle ends when the father John Grevatt was buried on 13th October in that same year. Snewin's manuscript copy of the headstone inscription tells us that he died on the 11th October, and that he was aged 34.

Inside Broadwater church there is a framed drawing made more than twenty years ago, showing this interesting and remarkable stone, together with a copy of the inscription. Here we meet the familiar problem of the erosion of numerals, for the date of death is shown as 26th of August, and the age as 61 years instead of 64.

It is, though, a remarkable stone, inspired by events both public and private, and made by a simple country craftsman, to whom it must have proved a welcome and indeed unusual commission.

As the stone melts daily under the stress of weather and the relentless drip from the trees, not many more years of visibility remain.

Sussex Family Historian Vol 9 No 2 June 1990